Monthly Archives: March 2013

NOTE: I am a big advocate of writer’s groups. Writers can write in isolation, but at some point they must show their work to other people. There is simply no substitute for dispassionate feedback from qualified readers. I have been a member of the West Hartford (CT) Fiction Writers Group for seven years. One of the most gifted writers in our group is Patrick Lee, who has published his first novel, The Flies of August, as PJ Lee. Patrick was good enough to submit to an interview and share his experiences in writing this novel. Here is a link to PJ Lee’s author page at http://www.amazon.com.

CG BLAKE: How did you become interested in writing fiction?

PJ LEE: I never saw a TV until I was 24 years old. I grew up in South Africa, where there was no TV and precious little else, besides books. I was the only child in the household. I was useless at sport. I pretty much had no choice but to read and write.

CG BLAKE: What was the inspiration behind The Flies of August?

PJ LEE: Suburban trash bins. I wanted to write a crime book and I was looking for a way in that would be real. The town I lived in, West Hartford, CT, converted to mechanized trash collection in 2007. Every household was provided with a new, very large trash bin. When the collection truck arrived it hoisted each bin up with a mechanical arm, and dumped the trash into the back of the truck while the driver sat in the cab. As soon as I saw this I thought, this is a really good way to dispose of a body: the trash bin is big enough, no human is involved in the process of collection, and your trash is immediately comingled with everyone else’s, eliminating traceability. But, this is the suburbs – way too peaceful for people to be throwing out a body with the trash, right? So my challenge became to build a plausible character who was apparently living a standard, docile suburban life, but was actually so torn apart that he could be driven to commit a gruesome murder.

CG BLAKE: Detective Donna Bradley, the main character, is a fascinating study in contradictions: a female struggling to climb the ladder in a male-dominated field, a tough woman with a tender side. How did you go about developing her character?

PJ LEE: I prefer writing female characters, I think they’re the superior gender, much more emotionally complex than men, who are limited by testosterone. I started with her internal monolog, just to get to know her. I was really just jotting down how she would talk, how she would think, at that stage I didn’t intend to write it in the first person. I shared those notes with someone who suggested that Donna’s voice was something distinctive that I could build around. That voice was witty but cynical. Cynicism comes from hurt. Loved children don’t grow up cynical. So Donna created for herself a childhood of isolation and the slightly distorted view of the world that comes from it. All Donna’s mistakes come from not feeling accepted. Her achievements come from the same place.

CG BLAKE: The fictional setting was a diverse community, with wealthy residents and a sprinkling of middle and lower middle class people. In some ways it’s a microcosm of America. How did your setting play into the story’s themes?

PJ LEE: I was writing this book through the period of the onset of the recession, the stock market meltdown. Occupy Wall Street was in full swing, people were losing their jobs and their houses. The polarities in American society were alive around me every day.

One of the characters, Amber Zajac, lives on the fictitious Wilton Lane. Detective Tony di Giorgio describes it as, “the dividing line between prosperous Webster and the part that slides into Hartford. Everything west and north of here is bigger and better houses. Go a few hundred yards the other direction and you’re into the tanning salons and tattoo parlors and then into New Park Avenue, which is drug-score central.”

The town of Webster is based on West Hartford, and Wilton Lane is based on the road I lived in. It is exactly like this.
I came to live in America in 2004. It’s obviously a big challenge to assimilate a new culture sufficiently to write about it effectively, and I made lots of mistakes along the way. But there are advantages in being an outsider. The English novelist Graham Green set most of his books outside of England. Of writing about other countries he said (paraphrasing) you have to be there long enough to understand the place, but not so long that it loses its novelty to you. That novel point of view is important. I will never know America as well as an indigenous writer, but I can use my external point of view to see some aspects of American society more sharply than people to whom it is all commonplace.

CG BLAKE: What were the biggest challenges you faced in developing and completing this novel?

PJ LEE: Doubt. Most writers know the experience of waking up in the morning, re-reading what they wrote yesterday and thinking: This is crap. I’ve been around a long time, I’ve got more rejection letters than most, it’s easy to give up. I am also the MVP of procrastination.

CG BLAKE: What message do you hope readers come away with after reading this story?

PJ LEE: Shy of the idea of sending messages. I think of writers like conductors of electric current. It’s our job to be plugged into the sensitivities of the society around us and convey that current to the readers. Too much interpretation or framing is dangerous. We all have to know our own strengths and weaknesses. I have a limited imagination, that’s not my strength. So almost everything in my fiction is re-worked from real life – my own experience or stuff I’ve been told. My skill is being able to shut up and listen to people. That comes from journalism training. People are dying to tell you their stories if you just listen. That’s gold.

So I just hope readers feel that I’ve captured something true and believable, that they feel the lives of my characters.

CG BLAKE: What lessons did you learn that you would like to share with others?

PJ LEE: The one you mentioned to me way back, but I didn’t listen! The first draft is just the beginning. I thought this didn’t apply in my case because I had been re-working sections many times as I went along. But it is only when you have written the last sentence, step back and “see the whole elephant” that you realize the head is the wrong size for the body.
I took two weeks away from the book after the first draft, then read the whole thing again, and realized that my protagonist’s crisis simply didn’t work. So I still had a way to go.

The Flies of August by P.J. Lee is a well-paced police procedural/murder mystery that centers on two shocking crimes that take place in a wealthy suburb of Hartford, CT. One is the disappearance of an academically gifted teen-age girl and the other is the murder of a powerful health insurance company CEO. The star of this complex and satisfying story is Detective Donna Bradley, the main character, who is struggling to rise through the ranks of a male-dominated profession, while looking for a lasting relationship.

While the Webster police devote maximum resources to solving the grisly murder of insurance CEO Nathan Weisz, the Chief assigns Donna to investigate the disappearance of 15-year-old Amber Zajac. Donna has a chip on her shoulder the size of a boulder. She believes the only reason the Chief chose her to lead this investigation is because everyone else was working to solve the insurance CEO murder case. The Chief teams Donna with a veteran detective named Anthony diGiorgio, who abruptly left a police department in Kentucky to start over in Connecticut.

Lee has a sharp eye for detail and a skill for character development. His precise description of an autopsy procedure is chilling and puts the reader right in the room. Donna is sharply drawn. A workaholic, she is a single woman in her early 30s who often comes home to an empty refrigerator or a pile of dirty laundry. She longs for a relationship, but until someone special comes along, she will settle for quick liaisons with guys who have an air conditioned bedroom to get through the steamy August nights.

Donna is eager to shine and show her male bosses she can handle a big case, but she stumbles along the way. The patient and supportive diGiorgio proves a big help to her. In spite of these mistakes, Donna follows her instincts as she pursues the case to its resolution.

Through Donna, Lee points out that a good detective must leave her moral judgments at the door when evaluating potential suspects in a criminal case. Police detectives are human, but they must feel no guilt when their investigations leave collateral damage, a point Lee makes adroitly.

The setting plays into the themes of the story. Webster is like many communities in America, where well-heeled suburbanites and hard-scrabbled working class people live and work side by side. Amber embodies both sides of this town as she lives in an unstable home in a lower-class neighborhood, but wins a scholarship to an elite academy in a nearby community.
I won’t spoil the ending, but ultimately Donna must make a major decision and her moral compass is her guide.

Author K.M. Weiland just completed a 12-part series on her blog (which I highly recommend) focusing on story structure. She spent a lot of time explaining the relationship between the scene and the sequel in fiction writing. When she spoke of the sequel, she was not referring to a series of books, but rather the reaction part of a scene.

Breaking it down to its simplest terms, the scene is where the action takes place. The sequel is where the reaction happens. The scene’s elements are goal/conflict/disaster, while the sequel’s elements are reaction/dilemma/decision, Weiland wrote. “This is where introspective moments, quiet conversations and character development happens,” she wrote.
Sequels must work on an emotional level. While the scene is action-oriented, non-stop action without a breather to give the reader a chance to reflect and the writer the opportunity to explore the character’s emotional depth through her reaction results in a story with poor pacing or no context. Or as Weiland put it, “Scenes drive the action forward; sequels allow characters and readers alike to absorb and react to what’s happened.”

I’d never viewed scenes this way, so this was a valuable revelation. I’ve always approached scenes with one of two goals: to advance the story by introducing new elements of conflict (or expanding existing ones) or to provide perspective through inner monologue or other reflective means. What I was really doing was what Weiland advocated on her blog: writing scenes and sequels. However, my scenes have rarely been focused as strictly action/reaction, and I’ve always been partial to writers like Anne Tyler, who dive deeply into the psychology of the characters (what Weiland describes as the sequel). Some of my work might follow this structure: scene/sequel /sequel/scene/scene/sequel. The sequel doesn’t have to be lengthy.

The sequel is flexible. “Although the sequel possesses three basic and unavoidable parts, just like the scene, it is much more flexible in execution,” she wrote. “The three parts may take place within a single sentence—or be stretched out over many chapters. Sometimes one or the other of the parts may be implied; sometimes they may appear to be intermixed with the pieces of the scene.”

The concept of scene and sequel may not be right for every writer. Writers cherish the freedom to craft their stories in the way that works best for them. However, writers who are looking for a sound way to approach the crafting of scenes should give the scene and sequel method a try.